Delectatio Morosa

Not because of Moussaoui. He’s guaranteed a life sentence. His Bush-like combination of fanaticism, incompetence, and personal obliviousness won’t be hurting anyone.

It’s what the government wants to do to him — and what public opinion on the left and right seem to be willing to let it do.

The prosecution wants to get him the death penalty for not alerting the government to the plot. By their reasoning, Moussaoui’s not only guilty of conspiracy. He’s responsible for the deaths of 3000 people on 9/11.

I think all Americans should be worried that they could be implicated in capital crimes for failure to volunteer information.

If the Moussaoui death penalty establishes a successful precedent, Americans would have a legal responsibility to inform — for crimes that had not yet been committed — or else face penalties equal to those imposed on the actual criminals.

Kind of thing you’d run across in East Germany, where the entire country was enmeshed in a web of secret denunciation and legal peril.

I doubt “sins of omission” penalties would have a significant deterrent effect.

They would simply put another unnecessary coercive tool into the hands of lazy investigators happy to construct bullshit, snitch-based cases

They don’t need the ability to threaten people peripherally involved in an investigation with a capital charge.

The cops already have conspiracy laws, the Patriot Act, illegal wiretapping, and all the other legal and procedural entanglements they can bring to bear on suspect or unpopular organizations and people who have the misfortune of being associated with them.

It’s all on the slippery slope of pre-emptive law enforcement, where there is a disappearing line between actual conspiracies, potential conspiracies, stuff that might turn into conspiracies, and occasions when the government doesn’t like somebody and cooks up a conspiracy case as a prudent piece of prophylactic frame-shopping.

By this logic, you’d think that Timothy McVeigh’s entire family should have been executed with him for failing to tell the authorities that McVeigh was an unstable, angry nutbar.

Or that the entire population of the United States should be executed in complicity for our unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq. Heck, we knew it was coming but only a few of us tried to stop it. And we didn’t try super-hard.

Hmmm…….

Surprised that hasn’t been raised as an issue.

The pathetic whining of the prosecution about the millions of pages of testimony and thousands of hours of work that would be lost is ridiculous.

Moussaoui pleaded guilty. He’s already going to jail for life.

The prosecution is saying, But can we please kill him, pretty please? We’ve worked so hard on the case (even though the guy did confess, which presumably saved the prosecution some work).

That’s justice on parade!

All this grunting is about trying to impose a dangerous and suspect interpretation of laws so the government will be able to threaten anybody with any relationship — not guilty ties, but relationship — to a terrorist activity with the death penalty.

I’ve complained about the Democrats and the left parroting the bankrupt “national security” arguments in order to gain “tough on terror” cred. The Moussaoui case is a classic example.

Eager to jump on an example of Bush incompetence, we piss on the prosecution for fumbling the Moussaoui prosecution.

But what’s at stake is not competence in the war on terror.

What’s at stake is a profoundly disturbing and dangerous expansion of governmental power.

I say, thank God TSA lawyer Carla Martin tainted the case with her notorious coaching.

We should all be on our hind legs opposing the attempt to get Moussaoui the death penalty, instead of being afraid of looking soft on terrorists and therefore piling on the prosecution for failing to kill this scary crazy brown Muslim guy.

Here’s what she wrote in her e-mails, as reported in the Los Angeles Times:

Of course, Martin’s main concern is the government’s assertion that advance intel is sufficient to prevent attacks (so they can argue Moussaoui’s refusal to provide advance intel is sufficient to make him legally culpable in the 9/11 deaths), which would mean that the FAA, TSA, and the airlines could be on the hook for negligence suits by victims and survivors if a future attack occurred after a law enforcement warning.

But she speaks the truth about the absurdity of claiming to be able to predict the future to a legal certainty.

Don’t deride Carla Martin. Give her a Medal of Freedom instead.

In order to declare that Moussouai’s sin of omission was directly responsible for the 9/11 deaths, the government has to assert that it could infallibly predict the one actual, beneficial outcome out of infinite future possibilities if Moussaoui had blabbed.

It almost sounds like science fiction: infallible psychics stopping the future crimes, like they did in the movie Minority Report.

But it’s not. In fact, it’s the opposite. The crime has to occur for the state’s supernatural power to predict the perfect alternative future to come into play.

What we’ll really get is zealous prosecutors/fallible inquisitors eager to pile up the number of the counts and the convicted for crimes already committed, tailoring their cases ex-post facto through pseudo-evidence, special pleading, and wishful thinking.

We’re condemning Moussaoui for omitting an action that — in an alternate universe the prosecution is free to invent, a perfect world of 100% obedience, government omniscience, and fault-free law enforcement — would have ineluctably forestalled the commission of a crime.

And where does causality end? Why aren’t we going after Moussaoui’s mother? She’s part of this too, having birthed the guy!

The guilty taint can be extended as far as the prosecutors want it to.

That’s not jurisprudence.

That’s theology.

So we should look to religion for the definition of guilt under which the government is seeking to execute Moussaoui.

The Catholic Encyclopedia usefully informs me that Moussaoui’s sin, although a sin of omission, is indeed a mortal one:

So we’re trying to impose the death penalty on Moussaoui for delactatio morosa.

Under Catholic dogma, the Bush administration is covered.

“Invincible ignorance” is an adequate defense against mortal sin.

But it can’t be a defense for us if we allow the death penalty to be awarded for guilt by association, sins of omission, and hypothetical versions of events.

Copyright 2006 Peter Lee

Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.